Welcome to Writing for Digital Media

“Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that’s what I’m going to talk about.” — Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science

The increasingly widespread use of digital-media texts — and how they are composed, who composes them, how they get distributed, what they are composed of — gives us an opportunity to think about writers’ relationships with those texts and with the readers who read them.

In this course, we will practice composing and designing digital texts while asking a series of questions that should help us think about what kinds of relationships we want to have with texts and readers:

Why and how do readers read?

Does our attention to audience, context, and purpose change when composing in digital environments?

What can the materiality — the material product of a culture — of digital texts tell us?

How does composing in different technologies shape our composing processes?

What is the relationship between coding and content?

Notice how each of those questions positions texts not just alphabetically, but also graphically and visually. This is a good thing because our course also encourages us, as both writers and readers, to take the time for looking and seeing — for paying attention to aesthetic and rhetorical meaning-making capabilities in writing for digital media.

While we work with some basic HTML, HTML editors, and image-editing programs, no previous technology or coding experience is assumed or required.